I wish I could name names
Unfortunately I can't, as I still work at the same company, and this customer is still a customer.

Anyway...

I was asked to do what seemed to be a fairly routine install, putting software on the customer's PC to link to some machines. Damn and blast, they'd installed some non-standard serial cards, and my software wouldn't work with them. We offered to swap out the serial cards FOC, but they were having none of it.

So off I went to rewrite the software to work with their non-standard card, and amazingly, it worked pretty well. We installed several sites, but the day after a colleague of mine installed one, it stopped working. They reckoned it had never worked in the first place and that our guy hadn't properly checked his work. He swore blind that he had.

I went out and discovered that THEY had installed antivirus software that conflicted with the serial card that THEY had supplied. It locked the system as soon as something tried to access the serial ports. Of course, my program was the only thing that did. They'd installed the antivirus the day after our guy did his work. It was working when he left it after all.

Anyway... Their card. Their antivirus software. Their problem, right? Nope, muggins here was sent to sort it out. I finally found some parameters for the antivirus software that omitted the troublesome area of memory. They weren't really happy with that (they reckoned it compromised the integrity of the virus scanner) but they did accept it.

And years later, it seems that those serial cards have caused them nothing but trouble. Those who were responsible at the time obviously wanted to pass the buck, so the story you're most likely to hear is that I was responsible for insisting that they used these non-standard cards.
( Horatio P Lemming, Thu 4 Sep 2008, 17:49, Reply)